Of all the unflinching moments in the new Netflix blockbuster, America’s Team: the Gambler and his Cowboys, one stands out more than most. It comes after the Dallas Cowboys’ former star receiver Michael Irvin is asked about the White House, the secret mansion where some players would unwind while winning three Super Bowls during the 1990s. “I was the president of the White House,” Irvin says with a cackle, his eyes lighting up. “It was a safe place for camaraderie.”
But this, it turns out, was a very different style of team building than going down the pub.
“We had five rooms and whatever you liked you were going to mingle with your like,” Irvin says. “In that room you may be smoking weed, in this room they may be doing ecstasy, coke, whatever. There’s a group of girls in each room and you just kind of bounced from room to room.”
While the two men reconcile eventually, it is refreshing to hear such honesty, especially as so many sports documentaries are compromised. We all know there is usually a price to pay for access. Questions unasked. Thorny topics skirted over. But in a world where most documentaries feel as airbrushed as a Vogue cover shoot, the Gambler and his Cowboys bucks the trend.
So why is that? Why were these people willing to unburden their souls and tell stories we haven’t heard before? Part of that is the skill of the documentary makers. They ask the tough questions. And they are so diligent they even get the prosecutor and judge in the case that led to Irvin being fined $10,000 for cocaine possession to talk about it.
Want to know what it is like to be concussed? Well, the Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman explains the sensation better than anyone I have ever heard. At one point he also talks about blood coming from his ear. In another, he admits not remembering playing in an NFC Championship game. “I watched the game the next day and I played well,” he says. That is a skill, too.
Wouldn’t it be great if we were able to watch something as unvarnished and raw about some of the great British teams? The Liverpool side of the 70s and 80s, perhaps, as well as United in the 90s? There is surely a great documentary also on the rise and fall of England’s Rugby World Cup winners, including the horrific concussion stories and the tabloid tales of dwarf-throwing contests?
Certainly the Cowboy and his Gamblers lays down the template. Towards the end of it, Irvin talks about being left temporarily paralysed after hitting his neck on the ground and calling his wife from the ambulance to tell her. It leads to him having to retire. Yet he also admits that such was his bond with his teammates that, if Cowboys were still in their prime, he would have risked coming back.
“We are all imperfect people,” Irvin says, with a sagacity of someone who has been there and done it all. “And each of us has at least two of us in all of us. That person you show everybody. And that person that you never show anybody.” The trick this documentary pulls off is to reveal those deeper truths.
